Wilma Mankiller, First Woman Chief of the Cherokee Nation (ep. 16.23)

We have very little idea who ran Native American tribes in pre-colonial times or even during colonial times.

The written records we have are English, French, or Spanish, and they were famous for misunderstanding the indigenous people that they were writing about.

The Native American oral records have passed through multiple generations and many traumatic culture-destroying events by now, and that always worries a historian who is trained to be skeptical about accuracy at the end of what amounts to a century's long game of telephone.

Even so, there are female leaders mentioned, such as the 17th century Widamu, a leader of the Pocasset people in what is now Rhode Island, and a woman known quite simply as Woman Chief, who led some of the Crow people in the 19th century.

This is not an exclusive list.

But for the most part, Europeans recorded that they were dealing with groups of people led by men.

That would be right in keeping with the rest of world history if it were true, and perhaps it largely was true.

Or perhaps Europeans thought that because they expected to see men as leaders.

They might have met a female chief and completely failed to notice her status.

One reason the treaties fell through so often was that Europeans were often asking native leaders to sign away rights and property that those leaders had no right to sign away.

It simply never occurred to most Europeans that the native power structures might not look like European power structures.

There were lots of other reasons those treaties fell through as well.

I'm not saying greed, dishonesty, and sadistic abuse didn't play a role.

I'm just saying that ignorance and miscommunication also played a role, even when intentions were good, which they often weren't.

The Cherokee are mentioned in the colonial records quite early on because they lived in the East.

Present-day North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee all had Cherokee people living in them.

It was a big tribe, with many bands, who were not always unified, which is another reason that the claim to chief is complicated.

Chief of what, exactly? A small band? All of the Cherokee? Even today, there are actually three federally recognized Cherokee groups, and there were certainly more divisions in the past.

No doubt the Cherokee understood what was going on, but the white people who wrote things down definitely didn't.

There wasn't necessarily any one person of any gender filling a chief executive role for all of the Cherokee.

Like every other tribe, the Cherokee suffered terribly from disease, loss of land, armed conflict, and many other horrors.

But they were still there in the 19th century.

Many had intermarried with white people, and many had been changed a lot by their interactions.

The Cherokee had some agriculture before contact with Europeans, but by the 19th century some of them were running homesteads the way white people did, up to and including the enslavement of black people.

They also developed a written form of the Cherokee language.